The psychological health benefits of accepting negative emotions and thoughts: Laboratory, diary, and longitudinal evidence

Abstract

Individuals differ in the degree to which they tend to habitually accept their emotions and thoughts without judging them-a process here referred to as habitual acceptance. Acceptance has been linked with greater psychological health, which we propose may be due to the role acceptance plays in negative emotional responses to stressors: acceptance helps keep individuals from reacting to-and thus exacerbating-their negative mental experiences. Over time, experiencing lower negative emotion should promote psychological health. To test these hypotheses, Study 1 (N = 1,003) verified that habitually accepting mental experiences broadly predicted psychological health (psychological well-being, life satisfaction, and depressive and anxiety symptoms), even when controlling for potentially related constructs (reappraisal, rumination, and other mindfulness facets including observing, describing, acting with awareness, and nonreactivity). Next, in a laboratory study (Study 2, N = 156), habitual acceptance predicted lower negative (but not positive) emotional responses to a standardized stressor. Finally, in a longitudinal design (Study 3, N = 222), acceptance predicted lower negative (but not positive) emotion experienced during daily stressors that, in turn, accounted for the link between acceptance and psychological health 6 months later. This link between acceptance and psychological health was unique to accepting mental experiences and was not observed for accepting situations. Additionally, we ruled out potential confounding effects of gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and life stress severity. Overall, these results suggest that individuals who accept rather than judge their mental experiences may attain better psychological health, in part because acceptance helps them experience less negative emotion in response to stressors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Figure 1

Conceptual model wherein habitually accepting one’s mental experiences (i.e., emotions and thoughts) contributes to greater psychological health via lower daily negative emotion (and not via daily positive emotion) experienced during daily stressors.

Figure 2

Mediation model from Study 3 testing whether habitually accepting one’s mental experiences (i.e., emotions and thoughts) predicts greater psychological health (a composite of psychological well-being, life satisfaction, depressive symptoms and anxiety symptoms) via less negative emotion (and not via positive emotion) experienced during daily stressors. Each indirect effect was tested independently. The indirect effect through negative emotion was significant, B = .19, SE = .03, CI₉₅ [0.13, 0.26], and the indirect effect through positive emotion was not, B = .01, SE = .01 CI₉₅ [−0.01, 0.02]. The unstandardized multi-level modeling coefficients (Bs) are shown for each link. The Bs for the paths where both acceptance and the mediator (either negative or positive emotion during daily stressors) were included simultaneously within the model are shown in parentheses.